The election for president is more than a year away. Neither major party has as yet chosen a nominee. Yet the results of the 2008 election are already in: the Democrats will recapture the White House next fall, whether they nominate Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama, John Edwards, or Bill Richardson. Only an unprecedented cataclysmic change in American politics during the next year could salvage Republican hopes.

This good news for Democrats and grim news for Republicans comes from the “Keys to the White House,” a historically based prediction system that I developed in 1981, in collaboration with Volodia Keilis-Borok, an authority on the mathematics of prediction models.

The Keys retrospectively accurately account for the popular vote winners of every presidential election from 1860 through 1980 and prospectively forecast the winners of every presidential election from 1984 through 2004. The keys model predicted George W. Bush’s reelection in April 2003.

The Keys show that elections are not horse races in which candidates surge ahead or fall behind on the campaign trail, with pollsters keeping score. Rather, a pragmatic American electorate chooses a president according to the performance of the party holding the White House as measured by the consequential events and episodes of a term — economic boom and bust, foreign policy successes and failures, social unrest, scandal, and policy innovation. Nothing that a candidate has said or done during a campaign, when the public discounts everything as political, has changed his prospects at the polls. Debates, advertising, television appearances, news coverage, and campaign strategies — the usual grist for the punditry mills — count for virtually nothing on Election Day.

The Keys include 13 diagnostic questions that are stated as propositions that favor reelection of the incumbent party. (See table below.) When five or fewer of these propositions are false or turned against the party holding the White House, that party wins another term in office. When six or more are false, the challenging party wins.

Even without counting a single economic key against the incumbent Republicans, they currently have a seven key deficit, one more than necessary to predict their defeat in 2008.

Two caveats are in order. First, as a nationally based system, the Keys predict only the popular vote. In the last hundred years, however, the popular and Electoral College votes have diverged only in the 2000 election. For the special circumstances of that election, see, Lichtman, “What Really Happened in Florida’s 2000 Presidential Election,” Journal of Legal Studies 32(1), 2003). Second, the Democrats may well introduce an element of uncertainly by making a path-breaking nomination of either a woman, Hillary Clinton, or an African-American, Barack Obama. The keys, however, are a robust system that has endured through momentous changes in the electorate, the economy, the society, and the technology of elections. It is unlikely that any contingency will alter the negative verdict on the party in power.

The verdict of the Keys for 2008 does not depend on the particular candidate nominated by either party. So my advice to Republicans and Democrats alike in the primary elections is to vote for the candidate you believe in for 2008 and forget the misleading pursuit of the false grail of so-called “electability.”

Summary of the 13 Keys as of September 2007:

The Keys are stated to favor the reelection of the incumbent party. When five or fewer are false, the incumbent party wins. When six or more are false, the challenging party wins.

KEY 1 (Party Mandate): After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than it did after the previous midterm elections. (FALSE)

KEY 2 (Contest): There is no serious contest for the incumbent-party nomination. (FALSE)